


Glitch in the System: If Only We Could Sleep Tonight

by SystemGlitch



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Bedtime Stories, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-04
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-03-27 04:11:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13872846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SystemGlitch/pseuds/SystemGlitch
Summary: By K.A bedtime story happens.





	Glitch in the System: If Only We Could Sleep Tonight

Rare were the evenings where sleep evaded Widowmaker - a few times a year at most, often less. Only recently did she notice a change, which she reasonably attributed to the revelations tendered her that fall. Thankfully, the uptick in frequency was a mild one, relegated to the occasional evening where rest came either more slowly or fitfully than usual. Only one - the first - was truly terrible; the rest less and less as she forged by trial and error a sort of revised normalcy. To most of Talon, nothing had changed, the broadened understanding of her own reconditioning kept furiously secret. Only she and Sombra knew, nursing that burdensome truth with care in the fragile moments they grew overwhelming. Beyond that, the sniper’s day to day simply bore an asterisk and a footnote indicating the existence of that remarkable derivation from the pre-programmed norm. **  
**

She was grateful someone else recognized the addendum; moreso that someone cared to learn its terms and conditions. Not that she couldn’t have handled it alone; nearly a decade of relative interpersonal solitude spoke to that. Even her and Gabriel’s sporadic encounters with the threat of kinship were three steps removed from anything like sincerity, limited to passing acknowledgements and nothing more. It would certainly have been harder without Sombra, her attempts at coping even clumsier and arguably less healthy. Still, Widowmaker harbored no doubt she would have managed.

All things considered, she attained - with the hacker’s assistance - the best possible outcome. Messy as it was, she it afforded her a greater understanding of herself - a necessary agony, forged into armor only knowledge could provide.  She attributed her success in major part to the other woman’s surprisingly unflappable patience, its stark contrast to every other aspect of her personality. In their line of work, it was as easy as it was common to drop intel and disappear - especially for manipulators of Sombra’s caliber. She could have disappeared at any time, could have stayed uninvolved, could have leveraged that information as blackmail.

But she didn’t. More poignantly,  _she chose not to_.

Widowmaker acknowledged that was not the norm, expressing her gratitude it in the stolen, soft quiet that bookended their days and in the spaces between breaths where found a semblance of warmth she thought dead and buried. She felt alive then, in a way she associated more closely with the snarl of gunfire than with any other human.

Some evenings, the minutes preceding sleep stretching ever longer before her, Widowmaker would tuck herself against the curve of Sombra’s back and listen contentedly to the natural syncopation of her heartbeat and breathing. This was an inversion of their standard routine, where rest greeted the sniper effortlessly but sometimes evaded her partner for minutes, an hour more. Widowmaker didn’t mind, embracing the closeness they repaired carefully over a handful of weeks. Despite the timidity with which they approached that daunting task, she felt their commitment to rebuilding had been rewarded in new and vital understandings neither knew they had lacked.

More often than not, Widowmaker eventually managed at least a few hours’ sleep. Others, she accepted with no small amount of chagrin it would be one of those unfortunate evenings where it refused a timely arrival. She attributed those nights to an aimless hamster-wheel of memories and the shadows of feelings they caused which she still lacked the capacity to parse:

Gérard, his hair tousled boyishly as he pulled her into the shower.

Searing, white-hot electricity and the smell of ozonic residue; locked muscles and clenched teeth.

Moira and Gabriel, their voices clear even beyond the med bay doors.

The biting scent of antiseptic. Blood - dark, venous blood carving canyons along the lines of her palms.

Sombra. The softness of her hands against the curve of her jaw.

She never understood the process by which her mind selected these memories. Once, they were merely confusing. They bothered her now, itched something fierce at the back of her mind and base of her skull; yet she was almost grateful that was the case — that they bothered her at all was an essential function of her finally understanding the circumstances which made them so.

It was a circuitous mess: and endless relay with neither start nor end, its checkpoints marked by substantial gaps of missing time and context.

What she did know was that wine and a bit of Balzac would probably do the trick.

Tucking a kiss beneath the hacker’s ear, Widowmaker scooted toward the edge of the bed, careful to avoid any extraneous movement that might wake the other woman. Grabbing her robe from the adjacent chaise, she shrugged it on, lazily secured its waist tie, and headed toward the door, stopping only to snag a copy of  _Illusions perdues_  from her otherwise spartan desk as she passed.

Unlike the rest of its modernized interior, there was little light throughout the western halls of Talon’s Venetian headquarters. Guided exclusively by memory and the intermittent, electric sconces along the walls, the assassin picked her way toward the kitchen, occupied solely by Gabriel and his usual late-night junk food craving.

“I did not have  _Kinder Happy Hippos_  delivered with the week’s groceries,” she observed dryly, leveling a pointed glance to the small, bulk box of chocolate-hazelnut biscuits on the counter beside him.

“Yeah, well,” he grunted in retort, though no further elaboration followed. Shaking her head, she brushed past, bumping him aside with one hip when he refused to surrender the few inches that made attaining a glass from the overhead cabinet possible. Gabriel watched quietly as she moved from cabinet to fridge, dark eyes dimmed by the exhausting cyclicality of life and death.

“Can’t sleep?” he asked.

Widowmaker peered over one shoulder as she plucked the re-corked bottle of red from atop the fridge. “Clearly,” she replied, flippant as ever until it occurred to her his inquiry may be sincere. “… _Et vous_?”

Reaper’s sole reply was a bemused smirk — as if she even had to ask. In all the years she knew him, Gabriel barely knew more than a few hours’ rest, if it ever came to him at all. She remembered their first deployments together, the slow realization his not sleeping was borne of a mix of pain, paranoia, and the same restlessness she knew yet somehow handled better than a decades-long veteran.

“What’s eating you?” he asked with marked trepidation, bristling at but not moving away from her as she returned to his side to pour the wine.

Tilting the glass just so, Widowmaker watched the steady flow of red into the bulb of the glass, its legs eking faint lines along the otherwise pristine surface. In nearly a decade, it was the first time either of them had ever overtly asked a question commonly relegated to exchanges of pithy remarks.

A year ago, she might have found it odd, even off-putting - not only in that the question was asked, but in that she would have never been able to answer it truthfully. Now, it felt strangely like something that should have been happening all along.

“Nothing surprising” she murmured, inclining her wrist to prevent any spillage as she righted the bottle. “We have had a month, is all,” she added with a nod toward the medical bay and the ever-locked door just ahead of it.

Before she could move to return the bottle to the fridge, Gabriel intercepted it, stealing it from her hand with a deftness she knew he possessed yet always found surprising. The contrast between them was always most marked in these casual interactions, yet Widowmaker observed a suppressed gentility beneath the harshness of his actions: it was there, in his handling the bottle with care even as he lifted to his mouth as much as it was in the softness of his late night wanderings so as to avoid waking anyone else.

Heaving a sigh, he peered into the bottle and watched its contents settle, weighing his response before lifting his eyes to meet hers. “She’s not going anywhere,” he said at last. It almost sounded like an apology. “And before you get smart - I’m not happy about it, either.”

Widowmaker nodded her understanding. “Then I suppose we shall be unhappy together.”

They watched each other a long moment, the silence succeeding her reply weighed by their implicit sympathy and unpracticed attempts at accepting it. There was something far away in his face, a piece of a man she only ever met in passing — a Gabriel Reyes known for quiet compassion as much as he was for martial brilliance.

Widowmaker hardly entertained that  _that_ version of him still lived, but in moments such as these - just the two of them, his searching glance giving way to a sad shake of the head as he clinked the mouth of the bottle against the rim of her glass - she almost thought she saw his ghost.

“Sounds like a plan,” he huffed, taking a second and final swig from the bottle before stepping aside, their closeness upended with the bottle before it. Gabriel didn’t wish her good night, nor did he say goodbye; he was there, and then, simply, wasn’t,  fading wraithlike into the shadows beyond the kitchen. Widowmaker couldn’t tell if the hissing, fading lines of his shoulders giving way to the night around him was a trick of the light or his own body.

She almost said something: that he didn’t have to disappear, didn’t have to be alone. That the thought occurred to her at all reminded her she shouldn’t.

Instead, she retired to their haphazard living room, wine in one hand,  _Illusions perdues_ in the other. Only the faint creak of the couch frame beneath her acknowledged the sniper’s presence as she propped herself up against one armrest and set the book in her lap.

How much time passed before a new, softer set of footsteps crept forth from the hall was uncertain, immeasurable only in an empty glass and the warmly-welcomed silence of her own mind.

Lifting amber eyes to the yawning archway before her, she blinked, meeting Sombra’s own, tired violet.

“You are awake,” she observed, closing the book over the skull-printed bookmark given her a few weeks back.

“No shit,” the hacker replied, a bleary grin sliding across her lips and into the shadows on either side of her. “One of those nights?” she asked, tapping one temple.

Widowmaker offered the other woman a small shrug, its delivery almost sheepish. “Unfortunately.”

“You wanna’ read to me?” Sombra asked, as if the suggestion were a natural part of their routine. It wasn’t.

Widowmaker rolled her eyes. “Balzac is not bedtime reading.”

“That’s not a no, Lacroix.”

Shaking her head, the sniper unfolded long legs and slid off the couch, stooping to pick up the empty glass in her free hand. “I am not an orator,” she huffed dismissively, retiring to the kitchen to deposit it in the sink.

Sombra followed, coming to a stop just behind her. Before Widowmaker could turn or respond, she felt the creep of arms around her waist, the press of one cheek to her back.

“I’m trying to help you, here,” she half-mumbled, half-yawned, the sentence muffled against her robe.

The assassin sighed. It wasn’t as if there were any reason  _not_  to, and she could still feel the tendrils of restlessness coiling just beneath the surface of her thoughts.

“Go to my room and grab the book by  _de Saint-Exupéry_. It is old,” she said, patting the back of one of the other woman’s hands as she loosened her grip about her middle. Sombra was off, carried away by a patter far faster than the one that initially led her to the living room.  Widowmaker returned to the couch, scooting herself back against the arm rest again and dangling one leg over the cushions’ edge to allow her partner room.

Sombra returned a few minutes later, a worn and faded little book proffered before her. “This the one?”

“ _Oui._  Come. Sit.”

Sombra obliged, settling neatly against the sniper.

“Why this one?” she asked, running a hand over the faded fibre cover of  _Le Petit Prince._

“First: it is a proper bedtime story,” Widowmaker replied, opening its cover to the opening pages. To her surprise, the vibrancy of the illustrations within was still somehow intact despite the passage of time and multiple cross-continental moves. It felt, in a way, like a little miracle. “Second, it was my favorite.”

Sombra leaned back, turning her gaze upward to meet the sniper’s. “Was?”

“I am a little old for bedtime stories,” she replied with a thin smile. “But, this one contains lessons which change over the course of one’s life. Ideas and images that last forever.”

“Like what?” the other woman asked, equally intrigued and incredulous.

Though answer came to her immediately, Widowmaker hesitated.

It was a soft lesson, precious and fragile and more tender than she could ever be. That she could apply it to anyone, let alone someone who lived in the shadows as she did, was at odds with the truth it conveyed. It carried with it a flutter of some warm  _something_ she associated exclusively with Sombra, with the compassion they fostered in the spaces between missions that left her feeling human in ways she thought impossible.

“Yoo-hoo, Spider. You in there?” the hacker asked, waving a hand in front of her face.

Widowmaker smiled - broad and genuine, the kind that always made Sombra smile in turn, though she never knew why.

“ _L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux_ ,” she replied at last, the grin lingering at the corner of her mouth. “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”


End file.
